An advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system usually comprises a smart electric meter (EM) device (hereinafter termed as an EM node), a communication system and an EM data management server to provide users with energy consumption information so that the users can know respective energy consumption conditions and reduce the energy consumption correspondingly. Moreover, the AMI system further has the advantages of supporting the fault detection, the blackout and power recovering management, the remote automatic metering and so on, and this helps to reduce the need for human resources.
In recent years, extensive researches have been made to apply the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol to the communication system of the AMI system. However, according to the AODV routing protocol, when a power supply loop of a region recovers from a power disconnect condition to a power supplying condition, all the EM nodes electrically connected to the power supply loop will broadcast respective route messages simultaneously and usually further broadcast route messages received from other EM nodes so as to re-establish data transmission paths. In a network environment with a limited bandwidth, broadcasting massive route messages simultaneously will cause collisions of the route messages and network congestions, which will make the networking speed slower and even disable the whole network.
Accordingly, an urgent need exists in the art to provide a mechanism of broadcasting route messages, which can effectively reduce collisions of the route messages and network congestions caused during re-establishment of data transmission paths when the power supply loop recovers from a power disconnect condition to a power supplying condition.